"We were terminated at one time," Brian Krehbiel says about the Grand Ronde tribes as the throaty thrum of farrier's rasps across wood fills an open-air workspace under a big white canopy at the powwow grounds west of Sheridan.

"So a lot of our traditional practices were terminated, too. ... I didn't have anything like this when I was a kid."

"This" is Bringing Back the Bow, a three-day summer camp in June for the tribes' youngsters, where a group of traditional archers, several from the Portland area, help the kids make their own longbows out of wooden staves. Some of the staves are harvested from the hills near Newberg.

View full size Andrew Allen, 9, makes a wooden bow with the help of Bobby Mercier at the bow camp at the Grand Ronde powwow grounds.Brent Wojahn

Then the kids get to shoot the bows they've spent hours carefully shaping with the rasps, sanding and painting in lively patterns.

All lined up on a shooting line like archers everywhere, the kids aim at foam 3-D targets -- bear, bobcat, turkey -- on the powwow grounds' huge expanse of grass ringed by firs and low hills. Real coyotes run along the edges of the field when the light is low.

"The kids all love it," says tribal member Patti LeClaire of Salem as she helps sand bow after bow. "Look how intense they are listening to their instructors."

LeClaire grew up playing with a cheap plastic bow, but her dad, born in 1909, described making bows from branches. Krehbiel, a cultural education specialist for the tribes, has a photo of his great-grandpa posing with a bow.

View full sizeJesse August Smith of the Kalapuya tribe poses with his bow near Dallas, Ore., in 1950. Smith is the great-great-grandpa of Brian Krehbiel, cultural education specialist for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.

The Willamette Valley tribes were rounded up and brought to the Grand Ronde area in the mid-1800s, Krehbiel says. Termination of the tribes' identity by the federal government in 1954 comes up repeatedly when the adults talk about the bow camp.

The tribes were reinstated in 1983, but the loss of culture that happened with the scattering of the people was a hole that the tribe is trying to fill with a cultural program that includes building dugout canoes and making cedar-bark baskets. And bows.

"Osprey, make a nice one you can keep," Marcus Gibbons of Willamina says to his teenage son. "Take your time. Put your medicine into it. This is something your ancestors did."

View full sizeOsprey Gibbons,15 Willamina touches up the paint on a bow he is making.Brent Wojahn

Osprey's bow had cracked when he pulled it -- as longbows can when they're bent the wrong way or not handled right when they're green, or when the wood has some kind of defect -- which means he's standing behind the shooting line watching the action, holding the shard of his longbow.

The shard is now "a zombie-fighting sword for when the zombie apocalypse happens," Osprey says.

His dad is still more interested in talking about the spirituality of the bowmaking than the zombie apocalypse.

"A lot of prayer went into everything we used because it's going to be used to take a life, to subsist our people," he says.

The kids shooting are not looking bored.

View full sizeGrave Gibbons, 12, of Willamina and Kailiyah Krehbiel, 11, of Sheridan laugh after they shoot their bows.

"I Ninja-ed it!" says one boy, leaping in the air with his bow thrust up after his arrow hit a foam bobcat 10 yards away.

The program is supposed to be for Native kids 8 to 18, but younger kids and non-Natives and adults -- anyone with a spark for archery -- are not turned away.

An Oregon business owner, Jack Holthaus, started the nonprofit Bringing Back the Bow program about 10 years ago in South Dakota. Holthaus, who bought health care companies and turned them around, lives 17 miles up the McKenzie River outside of Springfield.

The way he frames the story is as confession: He had a dream of hunting a buffalo from horseback, using a Lakota-style horse bow he made himself.

He heard of a Lakota man on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota who was renowned for hunting buffalo from horseback, and Holthaus traveled to the small village of Bridger, S.D., to find him.

His would-be mentor refused him, saying it was too dangerous for a man in his 60s, as Holthaus was at the time. But Holthaus spent some time in the village, which had maybe 15 houses. Once he saw the kids in the village, he says, "I was hooked."

He came back to Bridger to teach bowmaking, starting with eight kids. The program expanded to as many as 150 kids, moving to the larger town of Eagle Butte, and Holthaus also added a camp on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Once a year Holthaus travels to South Dakota for the camps in June. In the past 10 years, the kids in the camp have made upward of 1,000 bows.

Donations supporting the program come from individuals, not corporations or government grants.

View full size Grave Gibbons, 12, of Willamina makes a wooden bow with the help of Dan Dykes of Gold Beach. Brent Wojahn

Two years ago, Holthaus connected with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, which he chose partly because Grand Ronde is relatively close to many of the Traditional Archers of Oregon who support the program, partly because of the tribes' interest in reviving its culture, and partly because the tribes have the resources to help put on the camp. The confederated tribes own the Spirit Mountain Casino.

About 60 kids and a handful of adults built bows at the camp in June.

With a face reddened by the insistent sun, Rich Thompson of Newberg, president of the Traditional Archers of Oregon, bends over a band saw to rough out the shape of the bows where the kids can watch. The bows are made from staves of young hazelnut trees, or, in a concession to practicality, rattan staves that Holthaus bought.

The rattan, similar to bamboo, bends nicely and is less likely to crack. But the hazelnut is a local plant, some of it harvested in the woods on private property last winter by members of the Traditional Archers of Oregon.

View full sizeThe Grand Ronde tribes put up a spacious white canopy over picnic tables for the bow workshop in early June at the powwow grounds near Fort Yamhill State Park.Brent Wojahn

The tribe harvested some oceanspray, too, on the edge of the powwow grounds and up in a canyon on the 10,000 acres of woodland the tribe owns, which is drying for future use.

John Strunk, a master bow-maker and longtime junior high shop teacher from Tillamook, was on hand on the first day of the camp.

Strunk has long been interested in using small-diameter, native trees and shrubs like oceanspray, service berry, vine maple and hazelnut for bows in a return to native traditions. He has had success hunting with a vine maple bow.

Nick Kimsey, 28, of Grand Ronde has made an elegant sliver of a bow from a branch at the bow camp. He won't make the mistake of bending it too soon, before it's had a chance to dry.

"It'll go in my gun cabinet as my first bow," he says. "I'm going to make these forever after this ... I can teach my kid, and he can teach his kid.

View full sizeJacob Holmes, 7, of Grand Ronde shows great focus as he sands the tip of his bow.Brent Wojahn

Kimsey laughs a little about the band saw -- "it's not too traditional, but it helps people get started. You'd have to have this bow camp for a month if we were doing it really traditional, I'm sure."

There is much talk of passing the new and old skills on to sons and grandsons.

But girls making bows and shooting, too, like Daysia Duran, a self-assured 8-year-old whose bow sports bands of paint in fluorescent pink, green, purple, yellow and black, and whose hands are plastered with the same.

The hard part, she says, is knowing how fragile the bows are. Three have already broken in the class.

"The funnest part is shooting it because you never know where it's going to go," she says.

Daysia is used to shooting a compound bow by the hill next to her house.

As she walks off the range, she is clenching her teeth and making her eyes steely. These bows are harder to shoot.

But they have a connection to the land and the history that compounds don't have, and no one said it would be easy.

"We always like to say there'll be a day when they think this always happened," Krehbiel says, referring to kids learning to make bows and the gap in the tribes' traditions.

"They'll be like, 'What do you mean there was a time when that didn't happen?' The day that happens, there'll be a shift in people's lives."

As for Holthaus and his dream of bow-hunting a buffalo from horseback, circumstances turned it into something a little more emblematic of the 21st century.

A friend bought the right to bow-hunt a buffalo on Ted Turner's ranch in Montana. The appointed day was 19 degrees below zero, and a ranch hand drove them out to the buffalo range on a truck equipped with a hoist for the carcass. The friend got to shoot first, then Holthaus shot. The two arrows would have killed the buffalo, but they finished the animal off with a rifle so as to not prolong things.

Holthaus, 74, no longer has aspirations of hunting by horseback.

"I have mixed feelings about it," he says wryly, looking down.

He does, however, have a beautiful Lakota-style osage wood horse bow he made himself.